Two Brothers (39 page)
He chuckled. “That’s not likely,” he said, and kissed her lightly, teasingly, on the mouth. He stood, and what was a relief to Emily was also a tearing-away. “I’ve got a few things to do outside, then I’m going down to the spring to wash up.” He glanced at the clock ticking loudly on the mantelpiece. “I’ll be about an hour, I reckon.”
Emily knotted her hands together in her lap and nodded. Tristan wouldn’t be sleeping in the barn that night, or in the spare room, and he was reminding her of their agreement. They would share a marriage bed, and she was free to spurn his affections—if she could.
And now she wasn’t even certain that she wanted to. What sort of woman was she? She had not known Tristan Saint-Laurent a full week, and husband or no, he was a virtual stranger.
She sat at the table for a long while, torn between running away and offering herself to Tristan like a wanton. In the end, she compromised and took the middle ground. She cleaned up the kitchen, went upstairs to the master bedroom and lighted the lamp on the bedside table. She wondered, as she stripped off her clothes in a corner of the room, whether or not Tristan could see the window, glowing with welcome, from wherever he was.
After a careful washing, she donned a prim nightgown, one of the garments Aislinn had given her, and carefully hung her bright yellow wedding dress from a peg on the wall. She had brushed her teeth and was lying in bed, waiting and reflecting on the events of the day, when the door opened and Tristan came in.
She drew the covers up under her nose and peered at him over the edge.
He grinned, kicking off one boot, then the other. His hair was damp and freshly brushed and even in the dim light, his eyes sparkled with mischief and amusement. Behind the sparkle, however, blue embers smoldered, just waiting to burst into a conflagration. “Tired?” he asked, as companionably as if they were an old couple who’d shared the same bed every night for years.
“Yes,” she said, her voice muffled by the covers. Her gaze tracked Tristan as he unbuckled the gunbelt and crossed the room to set it on the bedside table beside the lamp, the .45 protruding ominously from the holster. Then he pushed down his suspenders, very methodically, and she noticed that his shirt was moist in front, where he’d splashed his bare chest with water and put the garment back on without using a towel. She did not dare to look at his trousers.
“Hmmm,” he said, and pulled the shirt off over his head. After tossing that away, he reached for the buckle of his belt.
Emily commanded herself to avert her eyes, and found she could not. His chest and shoulders were overwhelming enough; she did not need to see the rest of him to know that he was as magnificent, as inherently masculine, as any stallion, wild or otherwise.
He stepped back from the side of the bed to push his trousers down over his hips, and Emily caught her breath. He was erect, and his size was intimidating; far out of proportion, she was certain, to its natural counterpart, her own feminine passage. Her eyes skittered to his face and she saw that he was utterly without self-consciousness; his expression was confident, but not arrogant, and amusement touched one corner of his mouth. He was, to Emily’s consternation, glorious.
He turned the lamp down until the flame was almost out, and the room held more shadow than light. There was still enough illumination to see by, however.
“My turn,” he said, and tossed back the covers to reveal Emily’s nightgowned figure. He made a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue. “Unfair. Here I stand, wearing what God gave me and nothing else, while you’re swathed to the throat in flannel.”
Emily waxed defensive. “You didn’t say I had to be—to be
naked
. You said we were going to lie down together, that’s all.”
“Take off the nightgown, Emily,” he said patiently. “Let me look at you.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and tugged at the nightgown, baring her ankles, then her knees, then her thighs …
Tristan stretched out beside her, and her knuckles went white, her fingers full of bunched flannel. “You’re headed in the right direction,” he prompted mischievously. “Keep going.”
She could have refused him at any time, she knew that. But there was another part of her, hungry and eager, that would not countenance retreat. She pulled and, in one long, bumbling stroke, the nightgown was off, over her head. Away.
Tristan let out a low whistle, his gaze moving over her at a leisurely pace before returning to her face. “I knew you were beautiful, Mrs. Saint-Laurent,” he said gruffly, “but it turns out that you’re more than that. You’re perfect.”
Emily’s throat was tight, and tears burned along her lower lashes. She had never heard such words before, from anyone, and they were an elixir, mending tiny, forgotten fractures within, though there was something else she wanted him to say. “This seduction,” she said. “Does it involve touching?”
Tristan’s grin flashed. “Oh, yes. Considerable touching,” he assured her. Then, as gently as he might take up an injured bird, he cupped her left breast in the palm of his hand. “Like this, for instance.”
Emily let out a soft moan as he teased the nipple into a
hard point with his thumb. Feverishly, she reached up to put her arms around his neck and draw him down to her mouth for the first of a series of ever-deepening kisses. All the while, he continued to fondle and caress her breast, rousing a new and piercing desire that was as elemental as lightning.
When he lowered his golden head and took her nipple full into his mouth, she cried out in a sort of exultant protest, plunging splayed fingers into his hair, pressing him closer. He nibbled, then tongued, then suckled her, and when she flung both hands back onto the pillow in surrender, he caught them together at the wrists and held them gently above her head. He made free with both her breasts then, until she was tossing on the mattress, needing more, and still more—without quite knowing what it was that she needed.
He lowered a hand to the nest of moist curls at the apex of her thighs, parted her, and began a light, swirling motion with his fingers. Fire shot through Emily; she might have come back from the frantic stupor he’d induced by enjoying her breasts so thoroughly, but she was utterly lost in that moment.
He buried his face in her hair, his lips close to her ear. “This,” he said hoarsely, “is why it’s worth a little pain the first time. Remember this when I take you, darlin’. Remember how it feels, and how it will be again.”
With that, he kissed his way down her breastbone, pausing briefly at her belly, then proceeded to the place he had awakened to aching alertness. When he took her into his mouth, she was so stunned by the swift, searing pleasure, by the unexpectedness of the gesture itself, that she made a sound as wild and fierce as the cry of a she-wolf, half defiance, half submission.
He worked her until she begged, until she hurled her hips upward off the bed to meet him, until her entire body was slick with perspiration and her hair clung in tendrils to her cheeks, her forehead, her neck. Then, with a few teasing
flicks of his tongue, he sent her reeling, tumbling, end over end, into an inferno bright enough to blind her, hot enough to brand her forever, as his and his alone.
For a time, she was one with her own heartbeat, then there came a cataclysmic explosion, following which she was borne skyward upon a pillar of fire, only to descend slowly, slowly, in scattered, burning fragments. During the long fall, Tristan comforted her, held her, whispered sweet, senseless words against her damp temple. Transported, she was at the same time excruciatingly aware of the weight, heat and substance of his body, pressed against hers. Promising other, greater odysseys, deeper mysteries, still more breathless heights to be scaled.
She clung to him and wept, for she had never suspected that such pleasure, such abandon, was possible. He soothed her, stroking her gently along the curving length of her side, murmuring, occasionally kissing her eyelids, the hollow of her throat, her forehead and temples.
After a very long time, she settled back inside her own skin, and Tristan’s shadowed face came into craggy focus. The flame in the lamp on the bedside table was struggling, about to gutter out.
He kissed her mouth lightly, briefly, but in a way that reawakened the needs he had so thoroughly assuaged before. “Well,” he said, in a husky voice, “did it work?”
Emily knew what he meant—he wanted to know if his attempt to seduce her had succeeded. She stretched and crooned, rested, ready for another breathless climb. “Oh, yes,” she said, and wriggled against him, reveling in what she had wrought. He was not the only one who could cause physical havoc, after all; the proof of his desire pulsed between them.
“You understand what I’m asking you, Emily?” he pressed, and she loved him all the more—yes, loved him—for his concern, for his restraint, which she knew was hardwon. “I want to take you, right now, and it’s probably going to hurt some. There’s no way around that.”
“It can’t hurt more than needing you does,” she reasoned, drawing his head down for a hungry kiss.
He positioned himself, paused briefly to give her a chance to change her mind, then delved into her with a long, deep stroke. And there was some pain, though short-lived and, as the friction built, so did Emily’s responses, and soon she had given herself up, once again, to the primitive forces that made her entirely female. Tristan, too, was lost, and as their bodies interlocked in ferocious pleasure, their spirits took wing, like magnificent birds, soaring into the star-speckled sky.
EPILOGUE
O
NE YEAR LATER
…
T
HE BIG HOUSE WAS FILLED WITH LIGHT
and music, and while the band—three fiddlers, a piano player and a washboard man—held forth, couples from farms and ranches for miles around danced round and round the big parlor. The furniture that usually graced that room had been carried out into the front yard, under a clear, starry sky, where children of varying dispositions and ages played house, musical chairs and tag.
Folks were still getting used to calling the ranch the Double Crescent, rather than Powder Creek, but all agreed that the place had benefited by changing hands. Tristan Saint-Laurent was making it pay, and to virtually everybody’s relief, the missus had gotten shut of those sheep of hers, in midsummer, selling some, shearing some, and giving the rest to Black Eagle in trade for elk meat, herbal medicines and the odd bit of beadwork. Not that the sheep had really been so bad, for they hadn’t eaten so much as a blade of range grass.
Now that Mrs. Saint-Laurent, she was a pure fascination, just like the marshal’s wife, Mrs. McQuillan. Both of them in the family way and neither one making the slightest effort to retire from public view until their confinement was over. The two women were the closest of friends, but they
were also part of the community, speaking up at town meetings and clamoring for the vote.
As for the brothers, Tristan and Shay, well, they were so alike that it was nigh unto impossible to tell them apart. Once in a while, Tristan would put on Shay’s badge and serve a whole week as marshal, with nobody the wiser until they chose to let the word get out. The women, Emily and Aislinn that is, could always recognize their own husbands, and claimed they were as different as any other pair of brothers. Just about anybody else in Prominence, Miss Dorrie McQuillan included, would have disagreed.
There were lots of rumors about Tristan, for by virtue of his growing up away, he was a stranger. Some said he’d been a bounty hunter once, some said a Texas Ranger, and some even maintained that he was one of the worst outlaws ever to strap on a gunbelt. The speculations had spiced up more than one conversation, and made for a favorite topic at the feed-and-grain and around the potbellied stove in the general store. Some of the old-timers said there’d be gunslingers along to challenge him, but so far none had appeared. Most people figured it would take a pure fool to mess with him or Shay, given their obvious prowess with those .45s they always wore. Funny thing, that—the way they’d grown up apart and still turned out pretty much the same.
Now, on the night of the party, the parlor crowd cleared, and Tristan Saint-Laurent and his beautiful Emily took the floor for a waltz, soon to be joined by Shay McQuillan and the lovely Aislinn. They seemed to glow, the four of them, each couple gazing into one another’s eyes, as if oblivious to the rest of the world.
It was enough to make a person believe in fairy tales.
—
Rendezvous
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10